EU

Friday May 2, 2014

The EU’s Eastern Partnership summit that took place in Prague on 24-25 April was called to solve the Hamlet question of whether the programme itself is to be or not to be. It was unable to do so, however.

The collapse of the Ukrainian government and the cooling of relations between the EU and Belarus have virtually left just Georgia and Moldova in the orbit of the Eastern Partnership, although Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev also took an active part in the recent summit.

For the European Union, however, Baku is looking like an even less manageable partner than Minsk. In fact, the rhetoric of the Azerbaijan leader’s statements has more to do with Armenian-Turkish relations and the Nagorno-Karabakh problem than the Eastern Partnership issue, which is also far from accidental. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, however, pointed out that “Armenia joined the Eastern Partnership with a deep conviction that it is not directed against any third country.”read on...

Thursday November 28, 2013

This is an excerpt from RPI Academic Advisor John Laughland's recent RT interview. -ed.

Joining an old European geopolitical and ideological project would have been catastrophic for the Ukrainian economy, political expert John Laughland told RT, noting that it was actually the EU, not Russia, blackmailing Ukraine into signing a suicide note.

RT: The European foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton says Ukraine's U-turn is indeed a major disappointment. Who is the biggest loser here - Ukraine or the EU?

John Laughland: The biggest loser here is the EU because the EU has conceived this Association Agreement, like all the other agreements that it tries to sign with the former Eastern European states, as a geopolitical project. It is very important to understand that in the midst of all the accusations against Russia it is actually the EU which sees Eastern expansion as a geopolitical and indeed an ideological project.read on...